


to living and outliving

by silverhedges



Category: One Piece
Genre: Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 18:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18783670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverhedges/pseuds/silverhedges
Summary: What are you willing to live for? Love and love alone.





	to living and outliving

i.

You were born hungry. That's what Garp tells you, chuckling between mouthfuls of meat, "Starving! Screamed all the time! Grabby hands! Woke up five times a night and never wanted to stay still, always wanting to escape or run away… perhaps we should have let you!"

Your ears burn. You duck your head, scowling. How dare he be so familiar with you, how dare he embarrass you so, when he's never taken the time to properly know you. Garp is like a storm: arrives twice a year, overturns your world and beats you up. Then leaves.

What is wrong with you? That's the first thing on your mind when you wake up and the last thing when you go to sleep. You want to know what is terribly wrong with you that you’re cursed out for being a monster and a demon and that you’re going straight to hell. You want to know what is so wrong with you that Dadan cringes away from you, that the bandits complain and ignore you and don’t look you in the eyes. Real people deserve respect and attention. You’re not a real person.

Garp sits you down and he tells you why.

Why you? Why did you have to be born like this, to these parents, in this part of the world? Why did you have to be born into a world that hates you? A world with no prospects and no future. You wanted to be proved wrong. You wanted to be told that there is nothing wrong with you. Instead all you are given is proof of how wicked you are, right down to your blood and bones.

 

ii.

You do not like Luffy.

You don't. You wish you could. But he is annoying and persistent with the way he follows you about, ignoring your requests for alone time. He's dumb and always getting into scrapes you have to save him from. He doesn't listen to your problems or your troubles, choosing to sleep or blink at you with clear lack of understanding. He is not kind, for all his warmth and energy.

Luffy won't stay for you. He is focused on his own selfish dreams and desires, focused on a future only he can see. Sure, you'd support him. But you dislike his selfishness. You want someone who will listen to you, will stay by your side, will be kind to you.

You still love him.

Love is a choice. It is waking up every day and choosing to support that person, choosing to value them, choosing to help them in whatever way you can. It is a commitment. Love is a verb, not a noun.

And so, as much as you love him, you could stop loving Luffy tomorrow. Love is a choice and it is so easy to choose not to love someone. It is so easy to feel nothing towards them. You choose love anyway.

Why?

Well, at the grand old age of ten, you're already living someone else's life. You're Garp's future Marine, you're a monster, you're the next Pirate King, you're Luffy and Sabo's brother.

You want to be loved. You want to be someone's brother, their best friend, their most important person. And you can't be loved, because you never are, because you don't deserve it, but by Poseidon you crave it.

You had someone who loved you just as you were and someone you loved in return. A partner in crime. The world stole his life away from you and didn’t even leave you so much as a corpse to bury. Maybe that is what happens to people who love you, even just for a short time. Maybe you’re just bitter because you wish Sabo was still here. Maybe you’re just bitter because you wish, you really do, that it had been you who died instead of him.

Sabo loved Luffy honestly. You’ll do the same, even if you have to inhabit a ghost within your smile.  
  
  
iii.

You take your mother’s name. You choose it for yourself. Your mother loved your father, the worst man in the world. Surely if she had lived, she would have looked past your glaring, immutable faults to love you as well.

If your birth hadn’t killed her.

You carry these ghosts around. The boy you loved and lost, the mother you never knew.

 

iv.

When you are seventeen, you nearly drown after eating the Fire Fruit.

It is like being drunk on wine: it fills your belly with warmth, makes you burn from head to toe, clouds your mind with wild emotions.

Sometimes you wish you had died then.

 

v.

Whitebeard’s version of love is this:

Take away the people you found, your crew, who dedicated themselves to you, the first few people in this little universe who love you without knowing the truth of who you are.

Add a father and thousands of sons. This love is collective. This love is not specialised, not tailored to one individual. This love is the same love that is served out to everyone who becomes a son, regardless of their history or character or individual traits.

Yes, you say to yourself. This is love. This is enough.

(Right?)

 

vi.

You told yourself no regrets.

So, _no regrets_ , when he pins you down on the bed and shoves his thick fingers between your legs, holds your chin to turn your face towards him and let him kiss you, when your skin is crawling and you aren’t real anymore; _no regrets_ , when he gets you alone and forces his tongue down your throat in a stair-wall, fingers on the soft skin bellow your belly; _no regrets_ , when he walks you all around the port city until 4am and won’t stop kissing you, swallows up your protests with his tongue.

Drinking makes it easier. Everything more fuzzy, less scary, more laughter instead of whimpers. You abandon your shirt, you tease, you invite them. What of it? You want this, don’t you? You’re asking for it?

 

vii.

Yeah, along the way you’re kind to a little girl in a samurai country and some friends and some strangers. You are compelled to be warm and kind. You have to think about others all the time. You aren’t allowed to think about yourself. You aren’t allowed to want love for yourself.   
  


viii.

You're tired. You have nothing left to say.

All songs end, unable to string together any more notes into melodies. All stories end, because there is only so much action a person can do. All lives end and there is no reason for it. Death is the unimaginable. We spend our lives in endings and beginnings but death is the final end. Nothing more to sing or say.

It's cold and you're tired. You cannot describe the emptiness inside you, only talk around its shape. Exhausted, numb, frozen: none of your living words are working, the story inside you is as dead as you are.

Are going to be.

Are.

When does a person die? When their body gives in, when their soul admits defeat, when the last person who remembers them finally forgets? To live is to act and the living move on. The dead linger in stasis. Here you are in the depths of Impel Down, a chained-up corpse with a beating heart and breath.

The question of your life has never been what you are willing to die for. The question is: what are you willing to live for?

Your hometown. Dadan, Garp, Makino. The forest you grew up in, the familiar paths, the smell of Makino’s tavern. Or: the smell of burning, the insults, the way they turned away.

Whitebeard. Your father. Your brothers. And they left you here to die.

Luffy. Sabo. One failed, one dead.

The sea. Never yours.

Your mother's legacy. She cursed you with this life.

Simple pleasures. The feel of sunlight on your skin. Orgasming. Drinking water when thirsty. Eating a good meal.

None of it is enough. It’s all just fading memories, like a dream, like someone else’s life. You go through all these reasons; you think them through again and again and again. You decide no. You say no to each of these. You say: I would rather die than live for any of these reasons.

 

ix.

All you have ever wanted is to be wanted back.

All you have ever wanted is to be loved so much that your loss would be unbearable.

So when you kneel upon the execution platform, wood splinters digging into your skin, wrists rubbed raw by chains, when the sea breeze brushes the hair from your eyes and the salt is on your tongue, when you stare out at the endless horizon and watch everyone you love come to save you – for the first time, you think, they love me back.

For the first time, you think, I deserve to have been born. I deserve to live.

What are you willing to live for? Love and love alone.

 

x.

You are twenty years old. Barely a fifth of a lifespan. You have so much life left to life, so much more action to do, so many more changes to make upon the world. You burn with infinite potential.

You die anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> happy 3 year anniversary of Not Being Dead day x


End file.
